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Is supply chain management strategic or tactical? Are the best supply chains collaborative? Should the goal be an integrated supply chain or an integrative supply chain? The answers are a mixed bag, according to this month’s contributors.

History is a poor predictor of future sales in today's fast-moving world. Yet many companies still rely on traditional demand planning systems such as time-series analysis to create forecasts. Learn how new demand sensing technology is helping companies capture and analyze the abundance of real-time data in the digital supply chain.

The Leadership Challenge: Keeping Pace with the Skills Needed

The skill sets required to manage global supply chains today are not the same as they were 20, or even 10 years ago. And they will be different from the ones required in 2010. The best course of action: Be agile and ready to respond to whatever happens.

January 25, 2013

Supply chain management (SCM) is an evolving discipline. The art and science of managing a global supply chain has gone through a transformation in response to changes in the way companies operate as well as a more complex and interdependent business environment. Practitioners need to keep abreast of these developments and adopt the appropriate mix of leadership skills.

More specifically, as the profession continues to grow beyond its physical distribution roots, supply chain managers require both broader expertise and deeper technical excellence. How to reconcile these two seemingly opposing demands is one of the most difficult leadership challenges facing SCM today.

By tracing the profession’s evolutionary track and changing profile, we can identify responses to these challenges and prepare practitioners for the leadership demands that lie ahead.

Supply chain management (SCM) is an evolving discipline. The art and science of managing a global supply chain has gone through a transformation in response to changes in the way companies operate as well as a more complex and interdependent business environment. Practitioners need to keep abreast of these developments and adopt the appropriate mix of leadership skills.

More specifically, as the profession continues to grow beyond its physical distribution roots, supply chain managers require both broader expertise and deeper technical excellence. How to reconcile these two seemingly opposing demands is one of the most difficult leadership challenges facing SCM today.

By tracing the profession’s evolutionary track and changing profile, we can identify responses to these challenges and prepare practitioners for the leadership demands that lie ahead.

The best supply chains are more than a collection of technologies and processes. As supply chain evolves from tactical to strategic, they enable a company’s go-to-market strategy and competitive position.